Ranking peaks by steepness of their top 300 ft
There are many methods for determining peak steepness.
Previously, Tim Worth, John Kirk, and I calculated peak steepness for all peaks in the U.S. based on average drop at 100 ft radius (Colorado's top 100 steepest peaks using this method.) This works fine for most peaks, but also results in anomalies, such as walk-up peak Warm Springs Cliff being ranked #7 in Colorado, only because it is located next to one of the most shear cliffs in the state.
We wanted to find a way to calculate peak steepness that would primarily rank technical peaks as the steepest.
One way to do this is to calculate the area around a summit above a certain elevation drop from the summit elevation.
Since we are ranking ranked peaks, the best elevation drop to use is the same that we use for defining a ranked peak: 300 ft.
We are then defining two metrics to calculate this:
1) radial area method - go out radially from the peak until 300 ft drop is reached. Do this for every degree for 360 degrees around the peak and then calculate the area inside this polygon.
2) contour area method - calculate the area within the elevation contour exactly 300 ft lower than the peak that encircles the peak.
Here is an example image for Powell Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.

As you can see, the two techniques produce nearly identical results, with the exception of where Powell's northern ridgeline wraps around a bit toward the east.
We calculated each of these using 1 meter resolution LiDAR-derived elevation data for the entire state of Colorado.
John Kirk found that the best metric to use based on YDS class is the radial area method, as the top 18 peaks in the state are all 5th class.
He now has the steepest 200 peaks listed for Colorado using the radial area method on listsofjohn.com.
I also want to provide the steepest peaks in my local counties, so I'm providing them below, using the 'contour' method, because it better accounts for meandering ridgelines (although the results for the two techniques are nearly identical for most peaks, especially the steepest ones.)
Larimer County
Boulder County